The US supposedly lays out the new relationship to Israel

An interesting Jerusalem Post read about the meta-message the Obama administration is sending the Israelis.

"The Israelis apparently wanted to check if we are serious on settlements, and they found out that we are," a senior official told Haaretz. ....

Last night Defense Minister Ehud Barak met in New York with the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell....

Mitchell also emphasized that the U.S. does not accept the concept of "natural growth" for the settlements.

"We did not hear from the Bush administration about any of these so-called understandings with Israel on the settlements - all of which were supposedly oral understandings between different people every time," said one senior American official.

"But we've never heard a thing about them - they certainly weren't formal agreements between our governments. "The Israelis want us to commit to oral understandings we have never heard about, but at the same time they are not willing to commit to written agreements their government has signed, like the road map and commitment to the two-state solution."

The Israelis used the settlement issue to try to push (test) the Obama folks. Now the Obama folks are pushing back.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it's my sense that it's in the Obama DNA to resist being pushed. (This isn't about settlements.)